Divine Divinity Discussion

Originally Posted by Fluent
A traveler just shared with me some of the poems of Alrik Fassbaeur, lol. Didn't know you were in video games, Alrik . It was a good poem, too.

Thank you.

It was a weird time, I was in contact with the one responsible for that.

Besides, this was one of the last "real" poems I wrote, and the first hint towards me shifting more and more into writing short fantasy stories …

I translated it myself, then, and I once read that the professional translators had to be stopped translating it from German into English …

It has grown to be a custom of Larian to name NPCs in their games after active forum members. And there are LOTS of names in their first two games based on forum members !
I don't know about Divinity 2. It has more NPCs, and less NPC names based on forum members, I had the feeling.

— “ Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.“ (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

Originally Posted by Raze
The saves may not be gone; running the game as administrator may simply have changed where the game is looking. Did you exit and run the game again not as administrator?

Normally each save is a separate subfolder in the '..\Divine Divinity\savegames' folder. Under Vista/7, depending on how the user accounts are set up, if you install the game to the Program Files path, Windows can create separate savegame folders for each user, and then map that folder to the game's savegame folder (so it will just see the saves for the relevant user).
C:\Users\ %account name% \AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Divine Divinity\savegames

If running as administrator changes that behaviour, you may just have to copy/move the save files from the original location to what the game expects now.

EDIT:
If the saves did get deleted somehow, then for Vista/7/8, check if Windows made shadow copies of the saved games. You might be able to recover something with a program like Recuva, but the more you use the drive the saves are on the less likely that becomes.

I think the files are gone. I tried recovering them with Recuva, but I already uninstalled and reinstalled once or twice, so those files are probably long gone.

No biggie, I'll just start again.

I'm more worried about this lag I'm experiencing. It started in my previous save when I was exploring the north-west of the map. It wasn't too bad, but it was enough to be annoying. That's when I tried to fix it by running as an admin and it vaporized my save files.

But now I'm starting a new game and the lag is still there. The game also takes much longer to load at the start-up screen then it did in the past. Then just walking around Aleroth the game is laggy and slow. Any ideas what could be causing that?

I have read a few people had similar problems and made posts about it online. None of them responded back after a certain time so no idea if their problems were solved or not. Probably not. I'm hoping there's an answer though.

Is there some sort of temporary file cache that perhaps is full on my laptop? I wonder why the game was working flawlessly for a few days, then all of a sudden it started the lag which carried over to a fresh reinstall. Weird…

There is a cache folder for the game ( ..\Divine Divinity\Dynamic ), but I don't think it could cause performance problems… You can delete all the files in the folder if you wish, though, and the game will recreate then the next time it is started.
Files are created / copied there from the save game folder when you load, and written / copied from that folder when you save a game. Though rare, people have had files in this folder become corrupt and cause problems (like quest items from completed quests with one character being missing in a new game).

Are you shutting down all non-essential programs before starting the game? Did you make any changes before this started? If you didn't specifically do anything, an anti-virus program auto update, or something, could cause problems.

I shut down all non-essential programs except for Firefox. Perhaps I should shut down Firefox, too? I use Task Manager to check how many resources Firefox uses while running in the background and the CPU and memory usage has been very low. Could it still be causing a problem?

I didn't do anything differently since installing the game and since the lag started. It was running perfectly with no lag for a few days, then it just started all of the sudden.

It does seem to be running better now that I got the old configuration tool and set it to Direct Draw, but there's still remnants of lag at times. I'm not sure what else to do, already reinstalled a few times trying to fix it. I'll try shutting down everything before I play and see if that helps. Thanks.

Edit - So far it's working pretty much lag-free with Firefox closed. Good sign. I'm going to try to switch back to Direct 3D to improve the performance and see if the lag happens when I'm running that mode.

Also, the game is much easier the second time through. Spots where I struggled before have become much easier. I know to use tactics now and try to lure enemies out by themselves rather than running head on into a large group. Elven Sight and Ranger Sight are extremely useful to scout the area. That makes a huge difference and I'm able to conserve a lot more potions that way, and I'm dying a lot less.

Also, food is very important. I love having a large stock on me whenever possible for when I get out of a tough battle and need to heal up.

Really having fun even this second run through. This is a very good game.

— “ Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.“ (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

Fluent it sounds like you may be swapping (memory full, using disk to compensate). Firefox is a huge offender of chewing memory so yes shut it down. Look at your Task Manager for anything consuming lots of RAM. If I recall you have a pretty basic laptop. If you are using an integrated video card it tries to use system memory too so it becomes a losing battle. Divine Divinity is a pretty old game so your laptop should be able to run it. I ran it on a IBM T42 which was many moons ago without lag, and on XP…. That had a dedicated but whimpy vid card and no more than 2Gig of RAM. What are your specs?

By the way, when I researched this lag issue I found many people had the same problem and they are running desktops which are much more powerful than my laptop. There seems to be some lag issue that happens on certain rigs regardless of what programs are running.

I remember getting these sudden bursts of lag on my system while running a GPU-intensive program; they'd last for several minutes and then go away. I couldn't find any process that was eating up 100% CPU usage. Dang near drove me crazy trying to figure it out. Finally isolated it to the vendor's automated CoolSense program. Once I turned that off the system behaved properly.

*) The music didn't change when moving through areas, so lots of songs didn't even get played.

— "Mystery is important. To know everything, to know the whole truth, is dull. There is no magic in that. Magic is not knowing, magic is wondering about what and how and where." ~ Cortez, from The Longest Journey

— “ Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.“ (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

Yes. Eventually the files will get packaged so that the anthology version auto-updater can download and install it, but if you want the fix right away you'll need to download the files yourself and copy/extract them into the Divine Divinity install folder.

— “ Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.“ (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)